About Me

Monday, 28 September 2015

Football Crazed

Bubbles come
and bubbles go but none go on forever.
This basic law of finance and complex dealing etc. has universal
application. It may even apply to
football, that is the soccer variety, which has engulfed the media world with all
its ramifications.

In recent years
its expansion and presence has been fuelled by TV money in huge amounts forced
by the bidding of a select groups of providers with what seemed a captive
audience. Add to that the money piled
into clubs by large scale "investors" out to join what has seemed to
be an elite.

Apparently,
there has been a reduction in bidders for English clubs available to buyers and
from the look of many grounds it may be that apart from some big clubs
attendances are on the way down.

It does not
take much watching to realise that our football fans are not entirely the sort
of diverse group that reflect the urban hinterlands that the clubs allegedly
represent.

There is the
football itself. What happens on the
pitch these days is so orchestrated and organised that it is almost
predictable. Not just that but defence
is far better than it once was which is creating
a predictable that is boring game to watch.

Then, alas,
there are the players, managers and owners.
To be perfectly prejudiced there are few of them I would care to invite
to dinner or even to deliver the milk. Watching many of the players is often
looking at charmless thugs only there for the loot.

As for the
managers they seem to me to be people who have been put through the mill in the
most severe kind of interrogation training. This is not surprising when there is a rare
vision of the owners, mostly men doing Godfather impressions.

Beyond this
has been all the bad publicity reeking out of the major bodies supervising the
sport. Even if the accused are innocent,
there is now the feeling that all is not well nor honest. More risky, however is the increase in the number
of competitions adding and competing for the fans and casual watchers.

The key marker
to suggest that the bubble is about to burst is when leading politicians pay
homage to the whole caper. We have had
this in our Chancellor George Osborne handing over £3million of our money to
Chinese football to train 5000 coaches because of the intense interest in China
in English Premiership games.

George only
forgot to add, "Can you hear me Mr. Murdoch" when telling us, in that
Sky TV has football as one of its major sales features. There is a lot of Sky money in football,
almost as much as in politics. It is
possible that after two decades plus of this the viewers are now at saturation
point and the only way is down.

One way to
make it more interesting is perhaps rule changes to open up the game more and
increase chances and goals. But by the
time the football authorities get round to this it may well be too later.

We cannot go
back to 1857, see Sheffield FC above, nor even the I960's.